by Dave McComb | Mar 8, 2022 | Software Architecture, The Whiteboard
I’m reading the book Kill it with Fire by Marianne Bellotti. It is a delightful book. Plenty of pragmatic advice, both on the architectural side (how to think through whether and when to break up that monolith) and the organizational side (how to get and maintain...
by Dave McComb | Aug 7, 2015 | Software Architecture
In the physical built world there is the concept of “human scale” architecture, in other words, architecture that has been designed explicitly with the needs and constraints of humans in mind: humans that are typically between a few feet and 7 ft. tall and...
by Dave McComb | Jul 25, 2014 | Software Architecture
A Playbook you Don’t want to Follow A while back, I was working for a large consulting firm. When I was returning to the US from an overseas assignment, I was allowed to select the city I would return to. I told my boss, who was on the board of this firm, my...
by Dave McComb | Jul 22, 2014 | Software Architecture
Somewhere around 200 items seems to be the optimum number of interrelated things we can deal with at one time, when dealing with complex systems such as computer software. In 1956 George Miller wrote an article for the Psychological Review called “The magic number...
by Dave McComb | Jul 22, 2014 | Software Architecture
An Evaluation of Risk Factors in Large Systems Engineering Projects This article was originally published in the Journal of Information Systems Management, Volume 8, Number 1, Winter 1991. It is reprinted here by permission of the publisher: www.crcpress.com System...
by Dave McComb | Jul 22, 2014 | Software Architecture
Why can’t we deploy software as well we did fifty years ago? The way we build and deploy software is deplorable. The success rate of large software projects is well under 50%. Even when successful, the capital cost is hideous. In his famous “Mythical Man...
